Yemeni Forces Battle Islamist Militants for Southern Town

SANA, Yemen — Islamist militants battled Yemeni security forces in the southern province of Abyan on Sunday even as the government struck a deal for a cease-fire in the capital, Sana, with its tribal rivals, bringing relative calm here after days of fierce fighting.

In Sana, Yemeni officials said President Ali Abdullah had agreed to a truce with his historic tribal rivals the Ahmar family. Violence broke out between the two sides last Monday after Mr. Saleh refused to follow through on his promise to sign an agreement leading to his resignation.

“There is a truce and it is still holding,” said Abdul Karim Aleryani, prominent governing party official and adviser to Mr. Saleh. However other officials described the truce as tenuous and far from set in stone.

Still, after more than 100 people were killed last week in fighting that provoked fears of civil war, there were tangible signs of a reduction in tensions. Tribesmen from the Hashid tribal confederation loyal to the Ahmar family began Sunday to hand over to authorities government buildings that they had occupied last week.

“We will hand over the other ministries one by one gradually,” said Hashem al-Ahmar, one of the 10 Ahmar brothers, told reporters on Sunday.

However, a spokesperson for Sheik Sadiq al-Ahmar, Abdulqawi Qaisi, told local reporters that the Ahmars will fully comply with a cease-fire only if the government removes its security forces from their posts in houses near the Ahmar compound in the Hasaba district in northern Sana.

Even if the cease-fire holds, the crisis in Yemen is far from resolved. Peaceful protests calling for Mr. Saleh’s ouster have drawn hundreds of thousands of people on the streets for months. Three times Mr. Saleh has agreed to sign an agreement setting up a transfer of power and three times he has renegged.

In Taiz, a central city and home of the country’s largest demonstration, security forces fired at protesters from a government building on Sunday, killing four, according to local doctor, Abdul Rahim al-Samie. He said he still heard gunshots coming from the building until the evening.

In Abyan, a volatile province in southern Yemen, Yemeni security forces started shelling the coastal city of Zinjibar after several hundred militants took over government institutions there on Friday, residents said. A security official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the news media, said that five soldiers had been killed in the fighting there since Friday.

The militants took over banks, government offices and security headquarters, the residents said. They also said that the militants had been driving around the city in cars with loudspeakers blaring, “We declare that Zinjibar fell in the hands of Mujahideen after it was liberated from the agents of the Americans.”

It was unclear whether the militants, who traveled from Jaar to Zinjibar, belong to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the local branch of the international terrorist network, however the area is filled with citizens who are sympathetic to Al Qaeda.

The terrorist organization has used the lack of rule of law in Abyan to raise its profile, and the fighting in Zinjibar was another example militants in outlying provinces exploiting the chaos in Yemen to advance their causes. Militants took over the nearby city of Jaar in March and in the north Houthi rebels established themselves as the rulers of Saada Province the same month after government officials fled the area.

However protesters and members of Yemen’s opposition blame the fighting in Zinjibar on Mr. Saleh, who they believe is orchestrating the chaos so that he will not have to leave office.

“Saleh instructed to handover Zinjibar to armed groups working for him to frighten others that if he is gone Yemen will become Somalia,” said former minister of defense Abdullah Ali Eliwa, in a televised press statement.

He was speaking on behalf of military leaders who support the protest movement. “Saleh is trying to wrongly portray the army as a failed institution,” he said.

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Afghan Official Says NATO Airstrike Killed 14 Civilians

Local officials said the strike was aimed at Taliban fighters and missed. NATO said it was investigating.

Civilian deaths have strained relations for years between the NATO-led military coalition and the Afghan government, and NATO has made efforts to reduce them.

President Hamid Karzai, who has frequently condemned NATO for civilian casualties, called the deaths in Helmand “shocking,” and said in a statement that “NATO and American forces have been warned repeatedly that their arbitrary and improper operations are the causes of killing of innocent people.”

Witnesses said that an unknown number of bombs fell about 11 p.m. Saturday, landing on two family compounds in the Salaam Bazaar area of Now Zad District, a small farming community about 50 miles north of Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand Province.

Five girls, seven boys and two women were killed as they slept, the provincial governor’s office said in a statement. An additional six people were wounded.

Grieving friends and relatives drove through the night transporting eight bodies to the provincial hospital in Lashkar Gah, a resident of the village, Haji Janan, said. The other bodies remained buried under rubble as villagers tried to dig them out, he said.

The governor’s office released photographs of men carrying the dusty, bruised bodies of dead children swaddled in sheets into the hospital.

“We brought the dead bodies to show it to the officials, to show that the dead are innocent civilians, not the Taliban,” Mr. Janan said.

Lt. Tyler Balzer, a spokesman for the NATO-led military coalition, said several bombs were dropped but said he could not provide more specifics, including what kind of aircraft were used, until the investigation was complete.

“We are aware of the governor’s claims, and there were airstrikes in the area,” he said. “And right now we have an assessment team on the ground working with the Afghan government.”

Local officials said the airstrike came in response to an insurgent attack on a nearby American Marine base earlier in the night, but that the strike hit the wrong homes.

NATO was also investigating an air assault last week in Nuristan Province that drove out Taliban fighters after they had overrun part of a district center. A joint force of NATO soldiers and Afghan commandos called in airstrikes on Wednesday when they came under fire in the district center of Do Ab. The airstrikes drove hundreds of insurgents out of the town and killed more than 10 of them, NATO said then.

But provincial officials now say that NATO helicopters also killed more than 20 police officers dressed in civilian clothes. Qazi Anayatullah, head of the provincial council, said that as coalition forces arrived, the Taliban fled, leaving their white flags flying over police checkpoints they had overrun. When the officers in civilian clothes re-entered the checkpoints, the Taliban flags were still flying, and NATO helicopters bombed them, he said.

“They mistakenly thought they were Taliban because the police were wearing local dress,” Mr. Anayatullah said. Another local official said the police officers had changed into civilian clothes after the initial Taliban assault, hoping to avoid capture.

Lieutenant Balzer said a NATO assessment team had been in Do Ab for several days. “We’re hoping a clearer picture will come out soon and we’ll be able to release the findings,” he said.

But the episode points to the murky nature of the war and the difficulty of distinguishing between Taliban fighters and armed officers or civilians dressed in traditional garb.

In February, Afghan investigators accused NATO of killing 65 civilians in airstrikes in eastern Afghanistan. But NATO maintained that the people were killed were insurgents, and there were conflicting reports, even among the Afghan investigators, about the number of casualties.

Sharifullah Sahak contributed reporting from Kabul, and an employee of The New York Times from Lashkar Gah, Afghanistan.

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